


The Last Testimony of Jonathan Harker

by Grimmith



Category: Dracula (TV 2020)
Genre: Bloodplay, Body Horror, But not exactly, Canon Divergent, Emotional Abuse, F/M, I'm just here to bully Jonathan Harker, Less of a fix-it, M/M, More of a wreck-it, Power Imbalance, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexually Explicit Vintage Bisexuals, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-19 00:34:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22402357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grimmith/pseuds/Grimmith
Summary: The Jonathan Harker Foundation presents “The Last Testimony of Jonathan Harker,” composed in 1897 in Castle Dracula, Transylvania. The work is a separate account from Jonathan Harker’s Journal and was originally penned on individual sheets of vellum paper. Sections of the original work are missing or illegible. What follows is the most whole account acquired as of January 25th, 2020.
Relationships: Dracula/Agatha Van Helsing, Dracula/Jonathan Harker, Jonathan Harker/Mina Murray
Comments: 18
Kudos: 117





	1. Chapter 1

_11 November_ —Count Dracula has taken my journal. I know I have not misplaced it. Even in the delirium that is this hell, I know my own actions. Upon finishing my compositions, I place the journal in the same resting spot each night within my trunk, with ink and pen alongside. I have kept all of my belongings readily packed since becoming suspicious of my surroundings and my host; if ever the opportunity for escape should have befallen me, I was primed to move at once. A fool’s dream. 

By the time the true horror of my situation became clear, I was barely able to hold myself upright. My illness worsens by the day. I would abandon all possessions for a mere chance at freedom—but my resolve has not wavered. I cannot leave behind the poor soul who begged for my help. 

And the journal! The journal was crucial. There last night and this morning gone. The ink and pen untouched. Count Dracula must have slipped into my rooms by night and stolen it. One wonders why. To rob me of my last solace, or to destroy it for fear he would open the pages and find himself looking back? 

There are no mirrors here. 

I begin to wonder if evil cannot bear to look upon its own terrible face.  


I haven’t the strength nor paper to write it all again, not now. If the journal is not destroyed, I will take means to recover it. I must. But if this is all you—you! who might you even be that could read this account, and by what miracle or horror have you come by it?—if this is all you read, know that evil is real and it wears the skin of a man.

_13 November_ —This will be my last entry. Even the effort to move my hand takes astounding will and each breath tastes of blood. I am dying, you see. Such quaint words to see them written out. Much has happened in so little time, and I do not have much strength to record them. But I must fight against the darkness. The dreams. That is what he wants, I believe. But I must start at the beginning—

Through days of bed rest, I thought long and hard about my host. Since arriving at Castle Dracula, he occupied my every thought. His presence lingering between each labored breath I drew. So fascinated was I with the warden, I had neglected to truly observe the prison in which he held me. Oh, I had scoured it day after day, yes, but I had not paused to think. This castle is a monument, and monuments have meaning, design. Thou——

**This section of the text has faded over time and is too marred as to be legible. The Jonathan Harker Foundation has restored fragments of the original text, but much remains lost. ******

********

****

and in doing so, the one who asked me for help that first night long ago. Who c —— ls to scratch her plea into the glass. —— e left her ghastly mark upon me, which I discovered with horror. When I touched my neck, my fingers came away bloodied. I writhed against the space which she had forced me in, trapped no better than an animal in a cage. A terrible sense of doom seized upon me as I kicked and yelled. 

I did not fight long. A strong hand reached in and wrenched me from the box. It was Dracula who ironically answered my prayers by tossing me nearly across the room. So careless was this motion, he might have thrown a doll with the same ease. Having no strength or means to stop myself, I slid against the ground, digging my aching fingernails against the stone. One snapped clean. Otherwise, I was but bruised about the elbows and hip from my rough treatment.

I had no present cognisance of pain. 

The woman was there upon the floor, gasping, her body heaving around a mortal wound speared through —— 

“Why did you kill her?” I asked him. She drew her last [breaths]——

——strength I had left, she has stolen. After I laid on the floor, half-dead even then, Dracula approached me with such curious eyes. I saw no fury in them, only that damne —— gathered me like a bride into his arms. He seemed amu[sed]——

——would have asked her name so that I might record it here now.  


I have been returned to my bed. My dress shirt still soiled with my own blood and sweat, and tracing my fingers along the ragged edges of the wound, I can feel the bite gaping and sucking at the air when I breathe.

I will use up all the oil remaining in my possession tonight night. I am resolved to fight off both shadows and sleep. Like a child reprimanded, I have been sent to my rooms to think about my misdeeds and dwell upon the enormity of my fate. 

I am so damnably weak.

I will not see another sunrise nor Mina’s sweet smile. I will not breathe fresh air or hear the bustling clamor of England’s ports. This miserable room and its cold shadows will be the last impression I have in this world, upon which I presume to have left little impression myself. Only the journal. The lost journal.

I must keep myself awake. I must think clearly. Delibe —— hope even now. 

One question persists as I sit here awaiting my fate: What does Dracula care if I die in my bed, or the floor of his bridal chamber, or his arms? Does he want for my suffering? You should think by now he would have drank his fill of it. My eyelids are heavy but I fear my dreams. 

Is it even right to call them mine? 

I propose that these nightly dreams are his making. Nothing in this place is sacred. I once believed my own mind would be my final sanctuary in this encroaching darkness, the darkness that has claimed my body and soul one piece at a time. I was wrong. Nothing in this place remains whole or good, and even my dreams are this devil’s stomping grounds. Count Dracula is unstoppable. For him, no barriers exist. 

I am very cold. 

Dracula is m——

**The rest of the November 13th entry is illegible.**

_14 November_ —I fear something terrible is happening to me. I know now I will never again see beyond these castle walls, either by my own volition (God give me the strength) or by that of Count Dracula’s. 

The day’s events have jumbled my mind so terribly, and I must recount what has happened lest it slip into the feverish dreams that still plague me by nights. 

I had lit in my spirit one last matchstick of hope, a feeble flame with which I had thought to light my escape, only to have it snuffed so quickly by Dracula’s deft fingers. My foiled escape left me with no strength and a terrible wound. Today, it has shown remarkable progress. The edges of the wound have already closed and a knot of white, hard skin remains where it once was opened. I no longer have any sensation there. 

I had composed what I had believed to be the last account of my horrors. I stopped my previous account mid-sentence; the weakness overtook me and I collapsed at my desk.

When I next woke, I felt the softness of a bed beneath me and long, hard fingers at my throat. The girl. The beautiful, faceless girl. Her golden hair flowing around me, her hands finding purchase against my chest and neck as she mounted me, providing sweet, blissful solace with the merciful workings of her body upon mine.

While I am mortally ashamed to recount such dreams and beg forgiveness for further committing them to paper, you will soon see their importance. For as I felt the woman’s hands card through my hair, the follicles tore free from the scalp, and she rode me still with a chunk of my hair clutched in one small fist. 

I gazed at her and at the bloodied ends of my hair dangling between her fingers like an obscene trophy. My horror grew by measures as I tried to see her face, seeking out her eyes. I found in them a mirror, a black mirror. The creature I had become stared back at me. The sunken eyes and pallid lips. Blistering sores festered across my naked scalp. And a dark shape there, bent over me, suckling at my neck.

I was entranced by my own morbid reflection, this skull with a pulse, and was trapped in the mirror of her gaze. I had become death in skin, living there in those dark eyes. Black. Black eyes, and red--

I pulled away from the vision. _Look!_ My mind’s once soft voice screamed now, rending open my horror. _Open your eyes and look!_

____

____

Her skin began to break way. She rolled her hips steadfast, her flesh sagging further with each heave of her body. Rivulets of pus and blood poured from the fissures breaking across her weeping flesh. She raised her hands to touch her own breasts and rent them apart, her beautiful body falling away into quivering piles of muscle and bone. 

”Johnny!” she cried, either in ecstasy or agony while she shed this foul chrysalis, shrugging it off like a suit to reveal the truth beneath. Her featureless face was torn away to reveal a proud, aquiline nose and dark, slick hair, wearing a crown of gristle. 

Had I any pride left to spare, I might omit such things as follows from all written record, but this page, this testimony, must be whole. It must encapsulate the horror that is Dracula and the enticement that is evil. I must remind myself that my mortal dignity carries no weight here.

Count Dracula. The light fell upon his raw body, bared over me in triumph. Only sweat and blood clothed him, glistened upon a chest trimmed in dark hair now plastered to the skin. Our hips were joined obscenely, and to my shame, it was my arousal that held us fast. I was spread naked beneath him. His lips were thinly parted, eyes staring heavenward. He seemed caught in the bliss of our bodies meeting, and I thrashed against these horrors until my efforts drew his attention. 

A hum of interest purred from his throat and he checked his expression quickly. 

“Well, look at you, Johnny. The mild-mannered Englishman, a fighter in the end.” I stared up at him through the dreamlike fog as his hand trailed along my jaw, his touch no longer offensively cold. When trying to turn my head, I was made to look at him. To see his strong figure carved out in the moonlight, his powerful shape bent over me on the bed. 

I felt sickened by his beauty. How fine he had become while I withered. 

“This is a dream.” I realized it aloud.

“You flatter me,” Dracula said, typically smug and brutally clever, and rolled his hips into mine. I choked on my pleasure. 

“It’s a dream,” I repeated this despairing mantra again and again, bearing it through my teeth. “A dream. I’m not awake. You want me to think I am, but I’m not.” My body did not hurt. All those aches I had gained over the weeks, that had lived in my body for merciless hours, they were absent. Bliss flowed through my veins, his bliss, but I did not succumb to it. “Wake up.”

“Johnny,” Dracula tried to interrupt, but I did not let him or his body entreat me.

“Wake up. Wake up, wake up!” 

I screamed at myself, delirious, until all at once the pain hit. Sickened by it, my head reeled. The room became sharper, though filled with soft candlelight. It smelled of death and blood. Dracula perched over me, his grotesque face contorted and his mouth wreathed in a sharp, stunning red. He had ravaged my neck not with kisses but with fangs which had once been teeth. We were not joined at all and both retained our clothes. Though my weak body still ached for him, my spirit had proven its mettle.

So feeble were my lungs, I could not take a full breath. My life rattled in my chest, but I felt victorious. If he was going to kill me, I would not go in mindless bliss. I would see the monster for what it was and in my final hour, face it. 

Repulsed by my efforts, Dracula pulled back and ran a hand across his mouth. Then, with great relish as to make a point, he sucked the spare blood from his fingertip and the joint of his thumb.

“You’re really making quite a spectacle of all this,” he said.

“Spectacles, Count Dracula, are your forte. Not mine.” It took such effort to speak, I felt I was not choosing my words carefully enough. Each one could be my last. 

“Most people just sort of...go with it,” he continued, as if I had not interrupted him, “And why not? Dying is an ugly business. I alone can give you that easeful death everyone wishes for but never gets. Not a terrible bargain if you ask me, not that anyone ever does.”

He paused at length then. I felt beneath him very small and obscenely mortal, but I kept hold of my rage. I held it like a sword between us until Dracula at last smiled.

“You won’t have it, will you?” he said, beyond my understanding. "Not even now." His sharp nail traced my jaw. "I know all about it, Johnny. Those certain boys in your grammar school, hm? Sneaking glances across the courtyard, the whispers of your peers. The endless, _endless_ hours of double-entendre, never getting anywhere, both of you too scared or too polite. Studying the Greeks and learning _nothing._ " He leaned in, his sharp nose brushing against my ear as he whispered low, "The shame of Sunday morning when that fine seminarian catches your eye again. Naughty, naughty." Each blow was a fresh wound. I tried not to hear such things, but I had no strength in me to deny them. I suffered his scorn in humiliated silence until a half-hearted cry, more a sob than a yell, passed my lips. He hushed me and pulled me to his shoulder, then comforted me by licking the blood from my neck with his flat tongue. 

I was nothing in his arms. I could barely breathe, and perhaps sensing my weakness, Dracula set me among my pillows again. His mouth contorted, a certain intensity in his black eyes. I did not understand his purpose until a trickle of blood bloomed from his lip. He bit himself. 

“Come here,” he beckoned sweetly, with no smile. "Come here, come here. Just one taste before you go. Just one."

He kissed me. With a mouth full of blood--mine and his inextricably--he kissed me upon the lips and dipped his sharp spade tongue between my teeth; I had no strength to resist or reciprocate. His fangs made for harsh lovers against my wounded lips, ravaging them until their own blood sprang forth in droplets. 

I was at once gripped by a tumult of emotions beyond my own. It is hard to put into words how one can taste the formula of another’s being, but I tasted him. I knew at once it was not my own feelings burning through my veins; I could not have within myself such a tapestry of wickedness. 

I could taste his bitterness in his blood, yet his fondness, too. This scorn, this rage, this callousness--each taste of him brought a terrible sickness to my stomach. But within this grim mixture was his shame and his loneliness. Deep it was buried in him, and so terribly profound. Compelled by pity, I longed to seize upon it and suck it from his heart like a poison. 

Dracula reeled back with violence, a monstrous growl bubbling between his bloodied lips. Clearly he had found something in me which he did not expect.

He crudely spat our blood onto my chest. 

“On your deathbed, you think I need your pity?” I had bewildered him. Nothing I had said or done, but merely the earnest emotion within me. Though he laughed next, I suspect he had taken some offense to it.

I raised my hand with a strength that did not feel my own. My fingertips touched the side of his face and drew him in. I looked into his face, the perfect features arranged so carefully to mask their evil.

“Any creature that can inspire hatred in a heart like mine must be deserving of great pity.”

The next assailing of his lips was more violent. A fight. I whimpered, I think, as Dracula enacted some feeble attempt to humiliate me. His each attack went unmet. My body was failing, my eyelids too heavy to remain open. A mortal cold crept through my chest and I fell away from his demanding lips. 

I thought only of Mina. 

And then I died. 

An event which, I understand, may cause confusion and concern for anyone who might be reading my account now. And then, if you pause to think on it for just a moment longer, horror. 

Such terrible horror.


	2. Chapter 2

I woke to the vulgar contortions of my own body. Spasms of both pain and boundless energy racked each muscle, and I contended with them in equal measure. Fully overwhelmed, I kicked about pitifully during this process, going so far as to throw myself from the bed. The pain speared from my core, centered primarily about the breast and branching outward through leach limb. It did not lessen on its travel, rending through each digit until my hands would cramp so severely that the bones snapped.

(I hope this account suffices to any man of medicine or practitioner of faith that endeavors to make use of it. It is difficult to commit the accuracy of the unworldly to paper. When describing many of my trials within this place, the orderly structures of grammar and chronology prove more a barrier than an aid.)

All my efforts went into the enduring. So severe was the pain that I could not scream. The sensation was that of being restructured from within; the natural mechanisms of my muscles and bones being done away with so that another force, more powerful yet less rigid, might take up dominion there. 

Through all this, I came to understand what was transpiring. I had not been blessed with death. 

True fear drenched my mind. Those terrible creatures **¹**. . . no, not creatures, but suffering souls I had seen folded into the boxes! Was I to become like them? Dracula had prepared my box, readied for me an eternity of misery. Endless pain. Hell with no fire. 

**( 1. Cross-Reference: Sharma, Ramesh M. D. 1898. Post-Mortem Reanimation Case Study. )**

Through my ordeal, I could hear Dracula’s wild laughter. The Count was delightfully amused by my reanimation. Though he spoke, I struggle to remember what was said. I do not think I seized upon any of the words. It was not until it was over, when the last pain went from me like the final pang of childbearing, that I became aware of my surroundings. 

With effort, I righted myself on the floor of my guest room, bringing myself to my hands and knees. My muscles were still new and inept; I was a new child to death, and likewise possessed a child's clumsiness. 

“Ah, there he is, and back so soon." Dracula knelt near, making us almost at a height. How awfully my limbs shook beneath me. "Bit of advice, for next time, one should always leave long enough to be missed." At any moment, this aloof mockery could blossom into violence. I could not afford to focus on Dracula. I was desperately kindling my own strength, urgently tending its weak flame. Dracula proved an ally in this as he is in love with his own cleverness and takes great relish in his own voice, particularly when using it to disparage. I was fine prey for this at the moment and so he took his time. "People don't usually come back so quickly, but you, you just couldn't stay away. Did I make a compelling case for life? Were my lips so tempting that you shrugged off death just to come back for more?" A laugh, then, "Ah, is this a yes?" 

For he had seen me begin to crawl, quite undignified, toward what he mistook as himself. My aim was the door and the sliver of lamplight flickering beyond it. My limbs quickened but I had little control over them as yet. 

When Dracula took my true intention, he rolled his eyes and stood. 

“Stop.” 

He issued this bored command, yet to me, it snapped like a whip. My body jolted, pinned to the floor by hands and knees as surely as if he had slammed nails through them. His power over me is a frightful thing. I long to obey him. In those first moments, God’s voice could have boomed from heaven and it would not have compelled me so deeply as did Dracula’s idle instruction. 

I was mortified by my own compliance for it was not truly mine. 

But beneath me I saw my own hands, unbridled, and I resolved to move them. Against every instinct, I continued to crawl, then steadied one knee upon the floor as I resolved to stand. My leg wobbled when put to weight, treacherous and unsure at this direst hour. 

“Listening ears, please, Johnny!" Dracula intoned, more severely this time. "I told you to stop.” 

It rent my spirit in two to defy him. He could have well stopped me himself. Grasping the edge of the doorframe, I pulled myself up, standing proud at last upon my own feet. To be upright felt a miracle, and when I met Dracula's eyes, now face to face, he stared upon me as though I had indeed performed one. His eyes were struck with stunning wonder. And his proud mouth, the way it smiled at me with adoration! 

“Johnny--” 

I bolted from him, fleeing as a rabbit from a wolf. I cannot sufficiently explain how I managed this. The guest room he afforded me sits on a middle floor within the castle. One moment I was running through the doorway of this bedroom, the next I was on the main landing, two full staircases from where I had been previously, with no memory of a single step taken between either point. This all felt quite natural to me at the time. Perhaps my consciousness fled. I have read that in times of great crisis this may happen to those in distress when they are in need of instinct rather than reason.

My feat matters little, though. 

My mind returned to me as I breached the heavy front doors, assailed at once by the bitter night winds. My name rose from within the castle as if the ancient, Gothic structure had screamed for my return. All at once, I was overtaken by a swarm of bats, hundreds of them, their tinny shrieks piercing to the ears. They shadowed me out into the darkening night, arching first into the air and then diving down all at once, where their mighty swarm retook the shape of Count Dracula in the purpling dusk. Several feet in front of me he stood, seeming quite tall and strong after such a monstrous display, but every bit a nobleman, too. 

As if praying over mass, Dracula lifted his hands and entreated me with a smile.

“Let's chat, shall we? You’re a tad worked up--” 

Worked up indeed! 

“--but tell me, where exactly do you think you’re going?”

It was a fine question given the state of things, but I felt I had an equally fine answer: _"Away from you!"_

Dracula looked overcome again. I know that he does not love me. I carry no such delusions, but in that moment, I think he might have loved some idea of me. 

“There’s no need to run. Johnny, I know how things seem. You think I’m going to put you in some tiny box and listen to you cry forever, but I’m not! Not you. My other brides, they were all failures! But look at you, so…so willful! You aren’t like the others, no, dearest.”

He can speak so sweetly when he tries.

But I did not quite care what I was or was not like. Though not living, I was conscious and I could walk, perhaps even run again as my footing felt much stronger. I was going to get away from him and his dark prison and I was certainly not going to be any such bride! Though the shadow of the castle reached out even then, a long hand closing over us both, I was resolved to slip through its black fingers and flee into whatever life or unlife awaited.

I began to walk away. With no true plan or means of fighting him off, I strode right past Dracula. I found it suspicious that he did not stop me, and I had moved several paces before his voice reached out. 

"Hundreds of years! Centuries to come upon one like you. Like _me_! You can't know how wondrous you are, but I can show you! I'm the only one who can!" 

I did not heed him. I longed to, of course. Though I had sharpened the hatred in my heart to a fine point, there exists between us a connection that even it cannot sever. At any moment I expected him to leap upon me and rob me of my freedom, to shackle me with a strength I could not hope to match. The blow did not come. I remained unimpeded by anything but his voice, which had grown exasperated as one might with an obstinate child. 

“Well, don’t go that way.” 

Vexed by his unpredictability, I finally stopped, but would not turn about to face him again. 

“And why shouldn’t I? I have not been locked away that long, Count, I know my way back.” 

“Back to what? People? You don’t want to go among people. They have boxes, too!” Though I feigned not to hear him and walked on, he continued, his joyous voice following me through the night, “And you best pray one of them is smart enough to put you in one! Because you are going to get _hungry!_ ”

This ringing word gave me pause. Dracula would not let me leave his castle without some punishment, and at last, he had revealed it to me. If he would not stop me, it was because he believed ruin awaited me. I had to decide if he was right. After all, I did not feel hungry, nor a monster, nor even very dead.

But I turned to him again, my only source of knowledge. What a terrible fount of information from which I have to drink, certain that each taste of the truth could be laced with poison. 

“You’re wrong. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I would take my own life before I would take another’s.” The uncertain waver in my voice betrayed me, and my conviction did not impress him. 

He took from his coat a small knife, deftly flipping the blade between his fingers. 

“You can try. But do mind the face. We should keep that intact, I think,” he said. Then, quite sure of himself, he tossed the knife at my feet. 

I took the blade from the ground and studied my ruined reflection in its edge, dwelling on my situation. It may seem at first that Dracula had given me an abundance of choices. Compared to my earlier plight, a weak prisoner in a small room, I should have felt overwhelmed by possibility. Did I bury the knife within my own breast and hope for salvation, or turn from Dracula and flee into the world, where I might become some walking nightmare among the living? Could I find dark solitude in the Carpathians, an exile's sanctuary that roads and maps cannot reach, where I might never bother another soul? What would become of me there? 

Though these options I supposedly had, my instincts cautioned me. I have grown to know Dracula too well. 

His victims are hapless creatures compared to his might. His brides merely dull-minded prisoners. Even in dealings of his estate, he is a savvy businessman who banks upon assured profits. In sum, Count Dracula only plays games he is already devised to win. 

I made no attempt to use the blade. Dracula’s willingness to relinquish it already revealed its potency. When our silence drew on, he dared step closer. 

“You understand, don’t you? There’s nothing left for you out there. Believe me, I have been dining on those people for decades; I’ve taken the best of them, there’s really nothing left--” 

I didn’t want to hear such things, and in truth was hardly listening. I was making a choice.

You see, Dracula has made an error. He does not see it yet. I do not think he is capable of seeing it. He has had, in his greatly extended life, too many years of certainty! It has bred a terrible hubris in him. But I cannot just see his faults--I have tasted them. 

The knife fell from my grasp. I could not use it to save myself, no more than I could turn upon the road behind me and find Mina waiting for me at the end of it. I bowed my head in bitter defeat, hiding from his gaze and the magnitude of the choices pressed upon me. After some consideration as to my state, Dracula approached. He moved as one might confront an animal, and only when he was very sure that I would neither run or fight, he held out his hand. 

"Come, lovely," He did not demand it. His willpower did not ring through the word. When I remained unmoved, he entreated, much softer, "Please." 

Such strength it took! The mirage of freedom flickered all around me, a dazzling lure, but my dark fate is here. With him.

I took his hand. Such sweet relief he breathed in that moment when I did not reject him. He took me under his arm and wrapped his fine cloak gently about my shoulders. 

This was the moment. I stepped toward those gaping castle doors of my own volition, committing myself to a castle darker than the night around it. My legs were clumsy upon the handful of stairs leading to the door, and Dracula was fast to sweep me up into his arms, to carry me, his obscene bride, over the threshold. 

This was the moment Dracula decided that he had won. 

It is exactly what I needed him to think.

That was some hours ago. He endeavored to sit with me at first, but my demeanor made it clear I was in no mood to entertain conversation. A feat that required no acting. Though nonetheless himself, he has been very patient with me. I think he is being careful. I am something new to him, and perhaps he has not had something new in a very long time. 

I must hope this means he wants for me to last. 

At length, Dracula let me return to the guest room alone. That is where I write now. Though he is not with me, I know he is nearby. Fearful, no doubt, that I will have a sudden change of heart and try my own hand at climbing the castle walls. I am not yet so brave nor impulsive. I have other plans. 

First, I must continue to document what is happening to me in terms of anatomy and physiology: 

As mentioned, the bite wounds which I suffered previously have entirely closed themselves, and the bones which I surely broke while twisting and turning during my revival have fully mended. 

In a now painless fashion, I have lost almost all of my fingernails. The nail which was already missing is half regrown, a pearly shell jutting from the cuticle, its substance thick and naturally speared to a sharp point. As for the rest, I sometimes pick away the loose nails without thinking, like a child plying at a wobbly baby tooth until it by chance snaps free. Oh, and while on the matter of teeth, the only point of discomfort rests in my gums, which are swollen and feel sensitive to the touch.

The sores and scabs that mark my face begin to peel away like a snake shedding off its skin, and though I have only the reflection in the window to see by, the flesh beneath this dreary husk seems smooth, quite white and poreless. The deepness of my eyes has not improved and I remain very gaunt and skeletal about the face. 

My hair has made an odd turn. Where it once fell out in great clumps, it has now regrown, perhaps now fuller even than when I first arrived at Castle Dracula. 

Relatedly, the Count is quite obsessed with preserving my image. He mentioned something about sending for a painter, someone of both skill and learning. I have not argued against him too much, not yet, though I know what the man’s fate will be if he comes to this treacherous place. I must enact my plan before that happens. 

Which brings me to my second point, my agenda:

I must learn everything from Count Dracula. I am to be his ready student, a dark fledgling unto this new life. Through each night, I will learn all I can about this fiend that I am becoming. My feats, my strengths, my weaknesses. That which might be my undoing--and also his. First, of course, I must free the souls kept in the boxes and release them of this life. This treatment I also will give the brides he keeps on the upper floor. They should not be made to suffer any longer in that miserable state, and if I must be brutally practical about this nasty business, they will make good practice.

Then, when I am strong enough and proven capable--I will kill Dracula. 

I feel a yawning emptiness after writing such a statement. There is no happy resolve, I know. If I commit Dracula’s curse to death, so too must I commit mine. This castle will be my tomb, and I will bury him here with me.

  


_November 15_ —Change of plans. May need to find a tomb in Budapest.

We are to travel in three days' time. Three days! Here I thought I had the luxury of an eternity to enact my plans. Failing that, a couple of weeks. By his own admission, Dracula would make for England at the end of the month. He has hastened his plans. Three days. I confess I feel betrayed by the holy number.

The Count revealed this new agenda to me yesterday while we laid abreast in his coffin. 

I do not know if the sun is yet my enemy. I am not of a mind to find out. When night gave way to the morning hour, Dracula came into my room and bid me, if I had finished “grieving myself,” to join him in his dark crypt. The suggestion of laying with him gave me a revolted shudder, perhaps more than the deviant use of a burial chamber as a place of sleep. Yet I could make no objection. Count Dracula made two rules very clear to me:

1\. We must never be touched by direct sunlight.  
2\. We must rest, enclosed, upon the soil of our homeland.

I pointed out that Romania is very far from English soil, but he says Transylvania is as much my homeland as his. This is where I had died and, likewise, where I had been born. “Jonathan Harker was an Englishman,” he dismissed, “You’re a vampire.”

We went into his crypt, a bed necessarily unfit for two. I was reluctant to lie down. The long box seemed ominous to me even without my enemy inside of it. Dracula stepped in first. When I hesitated, he grinned, saying, “It doesn’t bite.” I find his humor almost intolerable. 

(I had considered that this was not my only possible resting place. Surely Dracula had made other provisions for his rest, should needs arise, but I was equally reluctant to sleep without him. He might seal me inside another coffin. Better to be trapped with him for one night than trapped alone for eternity.) 

If we both laid upon our sides, it was manageable, though there was no comfort in it. I was in living allegory, trapped in a box of living death with my most fierce adversary. Dracula seemed very at ease with the arrangement, as if we were boys at boarding school sharing a bunk. He spoke to me of our travels. We will stay in Budapest a fortnight before we set sail for England. Budapest, he says, will be more suitable for our purposes and will have “more tasteful company” than one finds in the country. Already wounded by the sudden affront to my own plans, I condemned his mood. 

“You mean there will be more than peasants for you to eat.”

“No,” he said smartly, “For _us_ to eat.”

Several times, his mere presence drove me near to tears of frustration, and I was glad to be facing away from him in the smothering dark. 

There, he could not see my devastation. To undo Dracula’s evil is my one comfort, the sole purpose that gives meaning to this endless suffering. I feared for my plans. I have such little time to stop him before we reach the innocents in Budapest.

At last, he stopped speaking. A blessed relief, I thought, so that he might say nothing else of his intentions for me. 

But in the long silence, I became claustrophobic. My mind raced with terrible thoughts until I had worked myself up. I was unable to move more than an inch in front of me and could go neither forward nor back. I stared into empty blackness, yet was centimeters from unyielding stone. My fear spread to panic. All the air seemed to go out of the room, and I lost all sense of which way I was facing.

Dracula must have sensed my struggling. His arm snaked around my waist. “I can’t breathe,” I told him, staring frantically through my blindness and seeing nothing. “I can’t breathe.”

“You don’t need to,” he drawled, half-asleep.

“But I want to!” 

Dracula pulled me near, steadied me against his broad chest and held me fixed beneath his arm. His words brush my ear, warm breath on cold skin. “Do you want to dream?” 

I shook my head. Though it would be a blessed relief, I would not let him desecrate my mind any further. Of that, he had done a fine enough job already. Rather I suffocate on my fear in the dark than let him in my mind. Clinging to his arm, I resolved to stay silent, to give him no need to bite me, and so made my panic and suffering discreet. 

For a long time, there was silence.

Then, though I know not how he knew I hadn’t, he said, “Close your eyes.” 

“It makes no difference,” I objected, only to be instructed again,

“Close them.” 

I did as he bid, trading one darkness for another. I did not think it would quieten my mind, yet a slow easiness came over me, and the horrible silence fell away as Dracula’s voice rose softly in the crypt. He was singing. Such words as I could not understand. This was the rich tongue of his eastern land, the song of a world both old and dark. 

As I lay there, I let his song wash over me. I did not know the words, yet I felt them. They stung in my eyes and ached softly in my chest. The daysleep stole upon me, and as it took me into its dark fold, my final thoughts seized upon the essence of his words, like the first stirrings of a dream:

_When my mother cradled me  
She sang only of sorrow_

_She sang to me of sorrow and wept_


End file.
